Seth Godin is one of the few people in the world who I randomly search for, and read ANYTHING that they wrote or recorded. Videos, podcasts, blogs, books, whatever.

I stumbled upon a great video today today with Kelsey Humphreys. I’ve not come across her before but she’s interviewed a lot of pretty interesting people. This one she did with Seth Godin was particularly good, so I recommend you check it out. If you’re interested, I made a note of my favourite sound bites below.

[For my own amusement, I included some of my favourite Gapingvoid cartoons in between each point, drawn by my friend Hugh Macleod, who has illustrated a bunch of stuff for Seth]

Watch >>

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

If your goal is to build an online business that eventually gets purchased, then you need new goals. I don’t know any successful person who started out with that as their goal.

HUSTLE?

Those people who are doing the “Hustle” thing (GV?)… you never meet those people at the other end. Hustle is not a strategy. (Just because their business philosophy worked for them, doesn’t mean it will work for you).

PREDICTIONS

You learn how to see by making predictions. Eg. Try things with little risk first (fantasy stock investing) and then see how you do. Keep tracking your fictitious investment and watch how the markets respond. You will notice more things and learn how to see trends. That’s how you begin to start noticing things before other people. (That’s a lot of “things”).

What leadership looks like. What leadership feels like.

CONSUMING (INFORMATION)

I don’t watch television. And I don’t go to meetings. So I have 7 more hours in the day than everyone else. If I do 2 hours of productive work in those 7 hours, as I walk around noticing things, that’s a good day.

DAILY ROUTINE

I don’t think creativity is the goal [of each day], I think it’s connection and trust. If you have more connection and trust than you had today, then you’re moving forward. If you have a lot of connection and trust, you will never have a problem making a living. Or never have trouble making a difference. So you need to be more connected AND more trusted.

Eg. I could give you 100 ways to increase your traffic online (which would increase your “connection”) but they would decrease your trust. So they won’t work in the long term. Likewise, there are plenty of ways that you can build trust, but they might not necessarily increase your connection, to the people that you really need to be connected to.

The goal then is to do more edgy work where you become more trusted, that helps you build more connections, and that helps you to come out ahead [of everyone else].

FREE

Don’t give away your work for free. Giving away your work for free doesn’t make you more trusted, it just makes you cheaper. The goal is to have work that no one else can do, that is so important to other people that they will happily pay extra for it, because no one else can do it.

TWITTER

[Seth writes books. And he doesn’t tweet]. Books change the world. Books make people cry. Twitter rarely does. Most people, if they stopped tweeting, would not be missed.